Coming Up: Irish Records, Northern Sources

DIPPAM, which is short for Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration. This website’s official launch is scheduled for March 21.

It’s billed as “an online virtual archive of documents and sources relating to the history of Ireland, and its migration experience from the 18th to the late 20th centuries.” The site pulls together documentation from a number of repositories and sources in Northern Ireland.

The three major areas outlined at the link include:

• Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, a database of 15,000 official publications from a collection of parliamentary papers from the era of the Union, including bills, reports and commissions of inquiry.

• Voices of Migration and Return, which includes more than 90 narratives from interviews with “returned and non-returned migrants from Ulster (9-counties) gathered during the course of two studies on contemporary migration (2004-2008).”

• The Irish Emigration Database, “a virtual library of emigration-related primary sources, principally letters to and from emigrants, compiled by the Centre for Migration Studies, Omagh”; a collection of 33,000 records culled from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and private sources, apparently to be expanded as new records become available.

The site’s development team includes experts from Queen’s University, Belfast, the University of Ulster, the Centre for Migration Studies and Libraries Northern Ireland.

At the URL you can read more details about the collections. There are also two PowerPoint presentations (scroll down to the bottom of the page) available for download about Belfast migration. It’ll be fascinating to see what things look like after the launch. If you’re in Northern Ireland, check out the home page for a series of workshops being held about this project.